How do you back up your photos???

It is easy to see why Calomaar has been criticized for his backup system, that has got to be the worst backup plan I have ever heard of. Memory cards are very expensive (he is getting ripped off at $35 per 4 gigs, I paid $69 for my 32 gig CF card) and memory cards fail. The number one rule of backups is to do multiple backups and keep them in different physical locations. The biggest problem people have with backups is that they don't know how to edit their collection. I take about 3000 images per month with my Canon 50d in Raw format which is about 25 megs per photo. That's about 75 gigs per month or almost a terabyte a year. I would be spending most of my free time backing up if I didn't know how to edit.

I download my memory card to a folder on my hard drive every day. At the first of the month I load them into Lightroom and pick out the thirty best images (that is one per day) and post process them. Then I save the original and the post processed jpg and delete the rest. At the end of the year I have 360 images for the year and I pick out the 100 best and dump the rest. Keeping every shot you take is just silly and massively time consuming, not to mention storage space consuming. Right now my entire photo collection takes up 7 gigs.

As far as backing up goes, my entire collection of stuff (photos, mp3s, software, videos and documents) is less than 20 gigs. Once a month I back it all up to a 32 gig flash drive that I bought for $49. I then copy the files to my girl friends hard drive. That takes about 3 hours. Then once every three months I burn 5 DVDs and mail them to my sister who stores them in her safe. So at any given time I have three or four different backups in three or four locations. That kinda makes it impossible for me to ever lose my collection.

I get a giggle out of the fact that my photos are 25 megs per shot. My first hard drive 22 years ago was a whopping 20 meg and I could never imagine how I was going to fill it up. It took me hours to back it up.

Seilerbird, I’m sorry that you think my backup system is the worst that you have ever heard of. It is apparent that your needs and mine are vastly different. I am not a professional, nor do I even qualify as an amateur, my photographic status is best described as hobbyist. While I take maybe 1000 shots a month, only about half are in RAW format. There is no way that I would be able to delete any, I’d likely wind up in divorce court. One picture a day as a keeper won’t work. I may take 45 or 50 pictures of the grand kids in one day, those are just too precious to delete. My nature photography is just for fun, and and my own personal enjoyment, and I have only had 15 photos published. As far as the 4 GB cards go, the cost is nothing @ $35 a card, you only get “ripped off” if you are unaware , and I am not unaware, I choose not to use the big cards. $35 a card is nothing when you consider the thousands you spend for a good lens. The early cards are from the point & shoot I started with, the others are from the DSLR I’m using now. I have 37 cards, that go back 10 years, and there has never been a failure, so it’s only a matter of opinion that they are unsafe. Hard drives fail, memory sticks and flash drives fail. Even cd’s & dvd’s fail, so one is as good as another. The photos are in the computers, and on the cards, the cards are in one home, and there’s a computer in each. I think I have it covered. By the way, the question on this post was ”How do you back up your photos”, not what is the best method for back up.
I’m not knocking your system, if it works for you that’s fine, so don’t knock mine, it works fine for me.

Tom